At Home - Bill Bryson [127]
Mizner was born into an old and distinguished family in northern California. His brother was the playwright and impresario Wilson Mizner, who, among much else, co-wrote the song “Frankie and Johnnie.” Before becoming an architect, Addison led a remarkably exotic life: he painted magic lantern slides in Samoa, sold coffin handles in Shanghai, peddled Asian antiquities to rich Americans, panned for gold in the Klondike. Returning to the United States, he became a landscape architect on Long Island and finally took up conventional architecture in New York City, though he had to abandon that career abruptly when the authorities realized he had no training in the field—“not even a correspondence course” in the words of one amazed observer—and no license. So, in 1918, he took his architectural practice to Palm Beach, Florida, which wasn’t so fussy about qualifications, and began to build houses for very, very, very rich people.
In Palm Beach he befriended a young man named Paris Singer, one of twenty-four children of the sewing machine magnate Isaac M. Singer. Paris was an artist, aesthete, poet, businessman, and gadfly who wielded mighty power in the neurotic world of Palm Beach society. Mizner designed for him the Everglades Club, which instantly became the most exclusive outpost south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Only three hundred members were permitted, and Singer was ruthlessly selective in whom he allowed in. One woman was banished because he found her laugh annoying. When another member pleaded for clemency on behalf of her distressed friend, Singer told her to back off or be banished herself. She backed off.
Mizner sealed his success by securing a commission from Eva Stotesbury to build El Mirasol, a winter home of predictably vast extent. (The garage alone held forty cars.) It became a more or less permanent project because each time anyone else in Palm Beach threatened to build something bigger Mrs. Stotesbury had Mizner slap on an extension, so that El Mirasol remained ever supreme.
It is fair to say that there has almost certainly never been another architect like Addison Mizner. He didn’t believe in blueprints and was notoriously approximate in his instructions to his workmen, using expressions like “about so high” and “right about here.” He was famously forgetful, too. Sometimes he installed doors that opened onto blank walls or, in one interesting case, revealed the interior of a chimney. The owner of a smart new boathouse on Lake Worth took possession of his prize only to discover that it had four blank walls and no way in at all. For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Mizner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Mizner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.
According to The New Yorker, Mizner’s clients were expected to accept whatever he felt like building for them. They would present him with a large check, disappear for a year or so, and come back to take possession of a completed house, not knowing whether it was a Mexican-style hacienda, a Venetian Gothic palazzo, a Moorish castle, or some festive combination of the three. Particularly infatuated with the worn and crumbling look of Italian palazzos, Mizner “aged” his own creations by boring artificial wormholes in the woodwork with a hand drill and defacing the walls with artful stains meant to suggest some vague but picturesque Renaissance fungal growth. After his workmen had created a well-crafted mantelpiece or doorway, he would often pick up a sledgehammer and knock off a corner to give it an air of careworn venerability. Once he used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at the Everglades Club. Unfortunately, the body heat from the